> that term) world we live in? The economy's actually shifted to emphasizing
> language and communication? That interpretation makes it worse than the
> one
> I couldn't take.
>
I don't know why. Of course, language and communication don't exhaust the economy--maybe we could call their economic functions ("consumerism"/branding/service work etc), following Raymond Williams, "emergent cultural formations." To me it certainly seems like a productive move to say that they don't represent something outside the economy, or a transcendence of the relation of exploitation, but are actually part of the production process and therefore sites of class struggle.
Far better than business-crazy futurists who think that we have transcended work, and grouchy left-wing traditionalists who see new forms of cultural production as the decline of civilization.